Sunday, September 18, 2016

Intelligent and Cyber Secure PSU.

Bedrock Automation has added an intelligent, standalone power supply to its growing line of simple, scalable and secure control technologies. Seeking to design the ultimate power supply, their engineers started with a blank sheet of paper, as they had in designing the Bedrock™ control system. The resulting universal power supply sets new standards for onboard intelligence, durability, cyber security and physical hardening in a standalone ICS power supply.

SPS.500 PSU

The new SPS.500 Secure Power Supply provides characteristic Bedrock deep trust cyber security authentication and onboard intelligence for diagnostics and secure Ethernet communications. Encased in a NEMA 4X sealed aluminum enclosure, users of any PLC, SCADA RTU, PAC or DCS can retrofit to the new SPS.500 inside or outside enclosures, anywhere in a plant and in harsh environments.

“ICS power supplies are one of the most failure-prone control system components, yet many users just expect them to fail and be replaced more frequently than other ICS modules. However, with advanced analog and digital components, modules and electro-mechanics, we believe that the power supplies should outlive the ICS systems they support. In addition, all modern digital products must integrally fend off cyber threats. We are confident that our new SPS.500 power supply is the most secure, intelligent and longest lasting standalone ICS power solution available today,” said Albert Rooyakkers, chief technical officer and vice president of engineering for Bedrock Automation.

Onboard intelligence
The Bedrock SPS.500 makes the power supply a viable participant in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with the following features not typically found in power supplies today:

• Ethernet and OPC/UA communications, enabling local or remote monitoring of power supply health for greater system reliability and plant safety

Physical Durability
As with all of its system modules, Bedrock Automation has designed the SPS.500 with extreme margins of safety and protection against the physical and electrical forces that induce accelerated wear. Unlike traditional standalone supplies that are housed in open vented metal, the SPS.500 is enclosed in a NEMA4X hermetically sealed solid aluminum metal case. This ground-breaking electro-mechanical design delivers many benefits to users, including protection from severe EMI/EMP, as well as from extreme temperature, shock, vibration and ingress by water and solids. This approach inherently delivers FIPS140-2 anti tamper compliance for cyber defense. The physical hardening makes the SPS.500 especially suitable for remote or extreme applications across the spectrum of automation.

Power specifications

The Bedrock Secure Power Supply provides single or redundant supply, using 90-264 V AC main voltage 50/60 Hz input. Its output of up to 500 watts is software configurable, between 21 to 28 volts. For more information about Bedrock power management, download the second white paper in our Revolution series: Revolution – Chapter Two: Empowering Power.

“The power supply has always been seen as a point of control system vulnerability, but until now, no one has invested much to address the issue. In doing so, Bedrock Automation has essentially created a new category of intelligent and cyber secure control system power supplies,” said ARC Research Group analyst Mark Sen Gupta.

The SPS.500 Power supply is available immediately. It can be mounted easily on pipe or wall, occupying about the same foot print as typical 500-watt power supply with redundancy.